[3363] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: milk is bad for your health?
pshuang@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (pshuang@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Oct 1 17:31:27 1992
Human beings (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) have been consuming
stuff like oranges and cow's meat and tomatoes (plus or minus the fact
that different fruits and vegatables existed in different geographical
regions and that only in the last few centuries have various "staple"
foods traveled around the world) for millions of years.
While it is true that we naturally consume milk as infants, we consumed
human milk (different make-up from normal cow's milk, almost certainly
even more different than what comes out of the commecialized dairy cow
nowadays, both in basic constituents like fat and protein percentages
and in antibodies and trace nutrients contained) and didn't tend to
consume it as adults (although I believe children are weaned later than
they are today in non-civilized cultures, true?)
(Arguably orange juice isn't necessarily healthy for you, either. Your
body may crave an orange, but when you drink a cup of orange juice, you
consume a particular portion [I nearly typoed that as potion, which is a
little bit too far in the direction I am taking] of many oranges, and
that portion [yes, even with all that vaunted vitamin C] may not be what
your body was really craving.)
Of course, I am somewhat hypocritical in this. I like my cup of orange
juice and I like pretending it's healthy for me. :) Even though I am not
lactose-sensitive, I have never particularly liked drinking milk. I do
like yogurt, although I am not convinced of the naturalness of that,
either (although fermented milk products have been around much longer
than commercial yogurt-makers).
